Notice & Comment

Call for Papers: “Judicial Review in an Increasingly Undeferential Age”

This morning the Supreme Court issued its decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California—better known as the DACA Repeal Case. In striking down the Trump Administration’s effort to rescind the Obama Administration’s immigration enforcement policy, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion for the Court highlighted the Court’s role in scrutinizing agency analysis. And in many ways the Court’s opinion echos its decision last year in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York, another opinion by Chief Justice Roberts that reasserts rigorous judicial review of agency reasoning.

These strikingly un-deferential opinions, along with the Court’s decision last year in Kisor v. Wilkie, exemplify the ongoing judicial and scholarly debate over the proper relationship between courts and agencies in judicial review of agency action—calls to either recalibrate judicial review, or to fundamentally reform it.

A few months ago, the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State announced that its upcoming year of “research roundtable” workshops would include at least one roundtable to discuss new scholarship on this theme of deference and judicial review in light of recent cases.

Today, to coincide with the Court’s decision in the DACA case, the Center is formally calling for papers on “Judicial Review in an Increasingly Undeferential Age.” The papers will be discussed at an October 30 research roundtable at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. We hope to attract an interesting and diverse mix of papers on this issue of fundamental importance to constitutional governance and administration in the public interest.

Adam J. White is an assistant professor of law and executive director of George Mason University’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.

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